merge: allow to pretend a merge is made into a different branch

When a series of patches for a topic-B depends on having topic-A,
the workflow to prepare the topic-B branch would look like this:

    $ git checkout -b topic-B main
    $ git merge --no-ff --no-edit topic-A
    $ git am <mbox-for-topic-B

When topic-A gets updated, recreating the first merge and rebasing
the rest of the topic-B, all on detached HEAD, is a useful
technique.  After updating topic-A with its new round of patches:

    $ git checkout topic-B
    $ prev=$(git rev-parse 'HEAD^{/^Merge branch .topic-A. into}')
    $ git checkout --detach $prev^1
    $ git merge --no-ff --no-edit topic-A
    $ git rebase --onto HEAD $prev @{-1}^0
    $ git checkout -B @{-1}

This will

 (0) check out the current topic-B.
 (1) find the previous merge of topic-A into topic-B.
 (2) detach the HEAD to the parent of the previous merge.
 (3) merge the updated topic-A to it.
 (4) reapply the patches to rebuild the rest of topic-B.
 (5) update topic-B with the result.

without contaminating the reflog of topic-B too much.  topic-B@{1}
is the "logically previous" state before topic-A got updated, for
example.  At (4), comparison (e.g. range-diff) between HEAD and
@{-1} is a meaningful way to sanity check the result, and the same
can be done at (5) by comparing topic-B and topic-B@{1}.

But there is one glitch.  The merge into the detached HEAD done in
the step (3) above gives us "Merge branch 'topic-A' into HEAD", and
does not say "into topic-B".

Teach the "--into-name=<branch>" option to "git merge" and its
underlying "git fmt-merge-message", to pretend as if we were merging
into <branch>, no matter what branch we are actually merging into,
when they prepare the merge message.  The pretend name honors the
usual "into <target>" suppression mechanism, which can be seen in
the tests added here.

Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/builtin/fmt-merge-msg.c b/builtin/fmt-merge-msg.c
index 48a8699de7..8d8fd393f8 100644
--- a/builtin/fmt-merge-msg.c
+++ b/builtin/fmt-merge-msg.c
@@ -12,6 +12,7 @@ int cmd_fmt_merge_msg(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
 {
 	const char *inpath = NULL;
 	const char *message = NULL;
+	char *into_name = NULL;
 	int shortlog_len = -1;
 	struct option options[] = {
 		{ OPTION_INTEGER, 0, "log", &shortlog_len, N_("n"),
@@ -23,6 +24,8 @@ int cmd_fmt_merge_msg(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
 		  DEFAULT_MERGE_LOG_LEN },
 		OPT_STRING('m', "message", &message, N_("text"),
 			N_("use <text> as start of message")),
+		OPT_STRING(0, "into-name", &into_name, N_("name"),
+			   N_("use <name> instead of the real target branch")),
 		OPT_FILENAME('F', "file", &inpath, N_("file to read from")),
 		OPT_END()
 	};
@@ -56,6 +59,7 @@ int cmd_fmt_merge_msg(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
 	opts.add_title = !message;
 	opts.credit_people = 1;
 	opts.shortlog_len = shortlog_len;
+	opts.into_name = into_name;
 
 	ret = fmt_merge_msg(&input, &output, &opts);
 	if (ret)